About Shakta Khalsa

Since the 1970s, Shakta Khalsa has had the great blessing to combine her two big loves–children and yoga–into what eventually became her life’s work; Radiant Child® Yoga.

She is a trained yoga professional at the highest level, designated by Yoga Alliance as E-RYT 500, and was named one of the top five Kundalini Yoga teachers in the world by Yoga Journal magazine. Additionally, she was the lead keynote speaker at the first National Kid’s Yoga Conference in 2014, and is a creative partner in the upcoming Yoga Dog TV show.

Shakta is an AMS certified Montessori teacher, and the author of five well-known Yoga books, CDs and DVDs. Her latest book, The Yoga Way to Radiance: How to Follow Your Inner Guidance and Nurture Children to do the Same, is scheduled for release in summer of 2016, (Llewellyn Worldwide)

She lives in the Northern Virginia area with her husband of many years, Kartar who is a lead teacher in RCFY 200 hour training, and enjoys life with him, their son, Ram Das, and their many animal companions.

When I became a Montessori teacher in 1981, I had been practicing yoga for many years myself and realized that children could effortlessly reap the benefits of yoga as long as it was presented in ways that spoke to them. So in my classroom, I created a fun, imaginative style of yoga that had children hopping around the room as “ribbiting” frogs, hissing as cobra snakes, and balancing on one leg as tall trees. They would sing songs of being brave, of finding the light in their hearts, and they would remember that they are perfect as they are.

The class would then culminate in a dramatic change of energy. These children who had just been robustly exercising would lie down on the floor totally still, eyes closed. I would then give them tools to paint peaceful, relaxing pictures in their minds and hearts. Their breath became the ocean—inhaling waves washing up the shore, exhaling waves returning to the sea. As they gently brought themselves back to the classroom, I could tell they had touched that still, calm center of themselves. My assistant, seeing the transformation, began begging me to do it with them every day. And that’s how my path as a leader in children’s yoga started!

More and more friends and teachers urged me to give these tools, these treasures, to the world, so I wrote the classic, Fly Like A Butterfly: Yoga for Children. From there, in 1999, I launched the vision of children’s yoga around the world by founding the Radiant Child Yoga (RCY) teacher training program, one of the first and longest-running certification programs for teaching everyone–no matter what level of yoga experience–how to share the joy and benefits of yoga with children.

As of 2016, the program has trained hundreds of thousands of RCY teachers from every continent of the world, and reached the lives of millions of children. Our vision? World peace, health, and happiness…one yoga child at a time!